Anti-taxers Speeding for the Cliff Edge
Steve M considers the logical conclusion of the GOP's anti-tax extremism and sees history repeating itself.
"Well, we'll just get by the way we did in the Great Depression -- on our own," [Ken] McGarva said, swatting mosquitoes on his porch after another hard day of herding dogies on his 1,000-head ranch. "We'll grow a vegetable garden, we'll use milk cows." If the roads are closed, he said, they always have horses....
This is delusional -- but it's increasingly widespread, and you should think of it as the wingnut version of late-'60s/early-'70s back-to-the-landism (which could also be pretty damn delusional). These folks don't have a coherent plan, but they think they have solid principles: Tax us less spend! Spend less! Oh, but give us everything we need from government. Just cut waste!
The next election cycle is going to be 1972, except in reverse. The out party's presidential candidate is going to have to seem sympathetic to those who wave the freak flag high. That's why Sarah Palin is still very much in the running. And if there's more right-wing violence in the next couple of years, the analogy could be even more precise, and Barack Obama's 2012 numbers could look like Nixon's forty years earlier.
Read the whole thing.
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1 comment:
I've been kicking around the idea of writing on this topic, but I couldn't come up with a simple statement of what the problem was till now - and you, YD, did it for me:
Tax us less spend! Spend less! Oh, but give us everything we need from government. Just cut waste!
Yup, that's what the frogs want - mutually exclusive things, like spend on everything we need, but don't spend on anything we don't like, but give us everything we want but protect us from ourselves so we don't hurt ourselves.
No wonder repugs are insane - they constantly hold several mutually exclusive thoughts in their heads at the same time. That would make ME crazy, too.
I've seen a couple of efforts at producing lists of what government does for us, to be used to put off or put down anti-government and anti-taxers when they get out of line. I think an effort to make as complete a list of this sort as possible would be worth the effort. Though it's possible that the wingers wouldn't pay any attention to it, as so often happens.
Anyway, thanks for an enlightening explication of a complicated thought process.
Wingers are nuts. Nuff said.
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